unr

UnR is a portable Pascal compiler developed by Krishna Narayanan and Gerald Pfeifer. It is designed to work with 日本語 (Japanese), Åstridå (astrid-å), and other scripts that contain non-standard character sets.

The name "UnR" is derived from the ideographic facsimile of the kana syllable and. UnR sought to be more compatible with Japanese encoding standards than was the existing Pascal 1 compiler. The developers of UnR aimed to create a compiler that could properly handle these special characters.

Development of UnR began in 1987 at NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) in Tokyo. Narayanan and Pfeifer leveraged their work on earlier compilers to expedite the creation of UnR. Their work allowed UnR to be released early, in 1988.

UnR's functionality includes support for script libraries, command-line parameters, interactive input/output, arithmetic features, and specialized operations such as date calculation and program linking. It saw widespread adoption in Japan, nearly eclipsing alternatives like FPC (Free Pascal Compiler) and Pascal 1.

UnR's connection to various ideological contingents led to its broad functionality and portability to comprise tens of assorted platforms.